On 5/17/13 11:38 PM, Andrzej Kozlowski wrote:> I mention this fact in order to make a point that nobody has been> making: these sort of things are important for many Mathematical users,> in fact infinitely more so that the kind basic language issues that> Richard Fateman has been carping about for over 20 years. These kind of> functionality is why many people use Mathematica. I therefore absolutely> disagree with the statement: "I am very happy with the functions> available in Mathematica 8".

Clearly one can continue to add libraries to Mathematica. Each timesome computational functionality is added 'built in' it replaces afunctionality (or potential functionality) that could be implementedin the Mathematica language, and may make someone somewhere happy.Many? I wonder how many people doing statistics are just waitingfor extra features to be added to Mathematica (vs. using systemsthat already provide such features, and have done so for many years)..

Possibly some other people will be inconvenienced by cost, size,complexity, etc. One hopes, not by much, if the design of featuresis properly orthogonal to other features. I do not object tothe goal that a computer algebra system should generally beextensible and extended to cover as much of math as can bedone "nicely". There are some designs that are especiallyuncomfortable -- for example imagine the result of merging pre-existingsystems each of which has a different notion of "integer".

My concern has been and continues to be based on the observationthat Mathematica fails to fulfill reasonable expectations on simple things, for example arithmetic and comparison of floatingpoint numbers. Thereforea package built on this foundation of sand may fail in mysterious(to typical users) ways. A package built by savvy programmersinternal to WRI may fail less frequently than one built forsimilar purposes by an "outsider".